BlackBerry Clamping Down On “Apps for” Apps

It seems that BlackBerry World is currently plagued by a bunch of apps titled “App for” followed by the app’s name. As you can see in the screenshot above, there are apps like “App for Line”, “App for Shazam”, and so on. These are in fact bogus apps meant to trick users who did not know any better.

Some of them could be actual third-party apps, but for the most part we reckon they’re trying to capitalize on popular app names in order to get users to download their app instead of the official one. Well it looks like BlackBerry has had enough and have begun notifying the developers, asking them to change the name of their apps.

BlackBerry has given these developers 48 hours to rename their app or have them removed from BlackBerry World. “Please rename or remove any applications with the “App For ” naming format, where is the name of a third party brand/company/application/etc […] Failure to comply within 48 hours will result in removal of the application from BlackBerry World.” BlackBerry also expects that future updates for the app will be keeping to the naming scheme.

We suppose better and tighter regulations would have prevented such apps from invading BlackBerry World in the first place, but we guess better late than never. So, any BlackBerry users out there tricked into downloading one of these apps unknowingly?